" As I've noted before on Business Insider, the part-time gig economy has broken a fundamental link in capitalism that was good for workers. Pay rates no longer

" As I've noted before on Business Insider, the part-time gig economy has broken a fundamental link in capitalism that was good for workers. Pay rates no longer move upward as unemployment moves downward because companies like Uber, Just Eat, and Deliveroo can switch their demand for labor on and off on a minute-by-minute basis. Self-employed folks making a living on Etsy, Amazon, Airbnb, or eBay know their clients instantly go elsewhere if they raise their prices by even a few pennies." Anyone who's studied the basics of Econ knows that this situation is called a Perfect Competition (as evidenced by nothing less than the admission of perfect elasticity of demand). It's not just that employers became 'more powerful', individual workers became more powerful in the sense that startups have been intruding on economic fiefdoms. What used to be monopolistic competition or even oligopoly (e.g news services) is now facing fundamental market structure changes that bring the cost of labor down to its 'true' value. It turns out the 'true' raw economic value of a lot of labor is what it would be under serfdom: subsistence wages. This is to say that individuals have become more able to enter previously restricted markets, with the consequence that few of them pay very well. (Exercise for the reader: Consider the correlation between the implicit class-signaling based monopoly of higher education and its effect on wages compared to the rest of the increasingly competitive malthusian economy.)